The reader will easily believe I did not feel perfectly easy under this treatment of an Invention to the perfecting of which (encouraged by the long continued patronage of a Graham, a Halley, a Folkes, &c. &c.—learned friends to society, and public good, whose minds were too enlarged, and spirits too liberal to admit that little jealousy of inferior artists, which since their death I have been exposed to) I gloried in sacrificing every prospect of advantage from other pursuits, and had willingly submitted to lead a life of labour and dependence. However it was too late to retreat; and I had only one means of success left, which was to follow the Commissioners in their own way. Accordingly after many difficulties (with a relation of which I will not tire the reader,[1] as it is by no means my
- ↑ Yet the details both of this and of subsequent passages in his singular history would have been sufficiently amusing, and not a little instructive; for he had fully experienced the hostility of those Commissioners, of learned designations, who,
masters of the subject, it may be set down altogether as a memento mori. Yet that native sincerity and openness which exposed him to be maltreated by his enemies at the Board of Longitude (who were his judges without appeal, except to Parliament) is observable in this tract. After all his labours, and a success so much within the limits prescribed by the enactment of Queen Anne, he was dissatisfied that the compensation for heat and cold, in the Timekeeper, was not in the balance itself; an acknowledgment of a defect, which drew from the writer of an article, we think in the Encyclopædia Londinensis, the praise, that—"he was candour itself."
